Medieval vessels

Dr Margaret Rule CBE, the British archaeologist who supervised the largest maritime archaeological excavation in history and the subsequent raising of King Henry VIII's warship from the Solent seabed, has died aged 86.

The Baltic Sea offers some very treacherous waters even under the best of circumstances. The price to pay for sailing the Baltic through the millenniums has been high, and traces of those costs are scattered over the bottom.

You could say that Richard Lundgren’s destiny was cast when his parents took the precocious, then eight-year-old Swedish schoolboy to visit the Vasa Museum in Stockholm.